Olaf Growald
Kari Crowe of MELT Ice Creams
With a new, nationwide shipping service and plans to sell products through a major grocery chain, MELT Ice Creams is surviving the pandemic while realizing long-term plans for expansion.
"We rolled with the punches and buckled down to see what we could do," MELT co-founder Kari Crowe said in an interview with Fort Worth Inc.
Though revenue is below 2019 levels, the MELT team’s efforts to diversify and adapt have “mitigated” the severity of the pandemic’s impact on the business, she said.
"We had to figure out where we could diversify our revenue, how to continue to get our product into the hands of our consumers in a safe way, and how to keep our staff safe and employed,” Crowe said. “So far, it's worked out.”
While MELT's West Magnolia Avenue location on Fort Worth’s Near Southside remained open throughout the pandemic, in March, Crowe closed the other two locations in Dallas' Bishop Arts District and Fort Worth's Sundance Square for six weeks due to a lack of traffic.
Since the company’s founding in 2014, Crowe’s primary focus has been growing by opening retail stores. Early last year, she opened the Dallas and Sundance Square stores. The year before, in 2018, she opened a central kitchen and headquarters she calls the “Joy Factory" on the Near Southside, setting MELT up for continued growth.
COVID-19 scrambled the plan. As it withered MELT's traditional in-store sales, Crowe’s priority shifted to selling through other venues.
“In the beginning stages of the shutdown, we had to move really quickly to adapt our sales channels to be able to continue to bring in revenue and keep providing as many jobs as we could,” Crowe said. "We have great relationships and friendships with chefs and restaurateurs in Fort Worth. We reached out to them to see if they wanted to carry our ice cream as an add-on.”
Curbside pickup and delivery through services including Favor and Caviar helped make up lost revenue, and Crowe struck deals for the first time with local restaurants to include her products with family-style meals from Ellerbe Fine Foods -- the first to partner with MELT – to Bonnell's, and others.
In some cases, Crowe said, MELT has reached wholesale deals with the restaurants. In other cases, the restaurants are taking a small cut of the sales.
“Restaurants were selling pints to their customers between $8 and $10, and our wholesale price would be a bit lower so they could make some margin,” she said.
As of late September, MELT products were only being sold with Bonnell’s to-go family meals and in the boutique grocery store Meyer and Sage. In the near future, MELT plans to begin offering larger wholesale quantities to restaurants to include on their dessert menus, Crowe said.
Outside of local restaurants, MELT's ice cream truck, the Joy Ride, played an important part in distribution. With catering sales down to nothing, Crowe and her team converted the truck into a miniature ice cream store, reaching out to customers via social media to plan routes through neighborhoods in and around Fort Worth.
"We brought our truck out to the community to encourage our neighbors to get out and have special treats at home," Crowe said.
Though all full-time employees were able to keep their jobs at MELT, the various effects of the pandemic forced a staff reduction.
Voluntary resignations, medical leave, furlough, and layoffs brought down the number of employees to 15 during “the worst of the shutdown,” Crowe said. In late September, MELT’s employee count was between 60 to 70 percent of pre-pandemic staffing levels, or about 30 people.
"We've been able to keep everyone who relied on us for a full-time income, though they might have transitioned to working in our kitchen if their location closed,” Crowe said.
“We had an advantage in that most of the employees that exited the company during the worst of the shutdown were high school and college students, and had other means of support. And we've been able to bring several part-time people back as our other stores reopen."
Crowe achieved a major goal in June when MELT began offering nationwide shipping of its products through Goldbelly, an online marketplace for craft gourmet foods.
"When the pandemic hit, we gathered our leadership team to see what we could do to increase revenue during this time," she said. "We'd wanted to do shipping for a long time, and this accelerated our timeline."
Crowe also partnered with small boutique grocery stores, including Meyer and Sage and Foxtrot Market in Dallas, to sell MELT in those stores.
As in the partnerships with local restaurants, pints go for $8 to $10, and MELT’s lower wholesale pricing allows those grocery stores to make a profit.
The expansion into grocery stores won't stop there, Crowe said: MELT products are on track to be available in a major grocery store in 2021, she said.
Product pricing will be similar to what customers pay in MELT stores, but each wholesale client is different and will have different requirements that may change the final price to the customer, Crowe said.
Though in-store sales of MELT products plummeted at the beginning of the shutdown and have been slow to recover, ice creams sold in grocery stores saw significant boosts in sales, she said.
“We hope to diversify our sales channels to hedge against future crises and capitalize on an increase in sales channels during the economic recovery,” Crowe said.
Crowe credited the MELT team’s efforts to adapt to rapidly-changing circumstances with the survival and expansion of the business.
"It takes a solid group of people working together to make something like this happen," she said. "If a business can make it through this, they can probably make it through anything. We're excited for the future."
Maggie Fraser is a Fort Worth freelance journalist.